Sonic Boom
by SergeantLuke
Summary: WARNING: DEAD FIC! Dr. Ivo Robotnik, of Eggman Enterprises, has made the most incredible discovery in history. With it, he can make even his most ambitious dreams come to pass- unless one of his own escaped creations can stop him...
1. Chapter 1

Sonic Boom

I am the smartest man on the planet. I've always known that to be true.

After all, could anyone _else _have been able to build a corporate empire as massive and successful as Eggman Enterprises? Very unlikely.

Could they have done it without ever having to hire a single employee? Nigh impossible.

Could they have managed to drive out all competition throughout the entire vast city of Mobotropolis? Definitely not.

Could anyone else, in the entire world, ever be able to do all that in a matter of only five years?

There is only one person on all of Mobius that could do that, and he is Ivo Robotnik. Me.

But even with all of my genius, skills, and resources, there was one discovery I made that shocked even myself. There are some secrets that no man or Mobian was meant to know, yet one night, out of sheer accident, I managed to discover the greatest secret of them all.

The Chaos Zone.

Now, we generally tend to think of the world as following natural laws. What goes up must come down; creatures are suited to their specific environments; there are limits to physical accomplishment; and so on and so forth. For the most part, that's all true- in _our _dimension.

There is one scientific question that has always baffled even the greatest minds on Mobius: just where do rings come from? Those gold round things are everywhere- in the ground, in caves, underwater, just floating in the air. Many primitive Mobian civilizations even use them as currency. Yet, there seems to be no rational explanation for their existence. They disobey every existing law of physics- they floated despite being solid, they were light as a feather despite appearing to be made of gold, and they had no natural purpose. Rings were a total enigma.

At least, they were until I applied my genius to the task.

I ordered my robots to collect as many rings as they could find- which took longer than I'd have wished, since they had to venture all of the way outside of Mobotropolis to find any. I didn't count exactly how many they had, but I believe it was over 200. I subjected the rings to various tests, but they did not react in the slightest to any of them- until I accidentally spilled tea onto the machine, causing it to erupt in sparks.

All at once, the rings reacted in the most peculiar fashion. They all disappeared in a bright flash of light -accompanied by a chiming sound- and seemed to be absorbed into the machine itself. After the flash ended, floating next to the machine was this incredibly large ring, as big as I am. It spun in an even, clockwise circle, and aside from its giant size, looked like any other ring. As I stepped forward to touch it, I was suddenly thrust through its center…

…and found myself in the Chaos Zone.

In the Chaos Zone, there are no rules. Everything you could ever imagine can be found there. Giant crystals, animals of bizarre and fantastic shapes and sizes, amusement park-like architecture… it was unlike anything any living thing had ever seen before. Logic does not exist in the Zone- nothing is constant, not even you. After a short while, I've found, anything that has entered the Chaos Zone is forcibly kicked out of it.

After I made my first trip, I was fascinated by what I had seen. I devoted myself full-time to uncovering the mysteries of Chaos, never leaving my main laboratory, and barely ever eating or sleeping. I knew that I was the only person on the planet that knew of the Zone, and if I could just find some way to make use of it, the possibilities would be endless.

Before I made this monumental discovery, I had used Mobians as my power source. It was the most sensible option- there were plenty of them, nobody important would miss them if they disappeared, and their life energy powered machines better than any other energy source on Mobius. But this new energy, this Chaos Energy, was something far stronger. Harnessing them for use as a direct power source proved fruitless; the energy was too volatile to be condensed into small enough containers. But I found an alternative option: exposing the Mobians to the Energy, and just seeing what happened.

I used a high-powered pressure cannon to bathe the animal from head to toe in extracted energy. Many of the test subjects had no reaction at all, or died in gruesome ways; no big loss, even if it did cause an awful mess. What fascinated me were the successful results.

The ugly little creatures gained new attributes that simply should not have been possible. A rabbit could suddenly fly with its ears. A chameleon was now able to turn literally invincible. A bee grew to giant size. A fox grew a second tail.

But the most incredible of all was what I called the Sonic Project.

The little hedgehog had a terrible attitude, and at first, I had to put him under if I wanted to even strap him into the testing chair. But as time went on, he stopped resisting. I suspect that he was starting to like the changes- and who wouldn't?

The Sonic Project became _fast. _Incredibly fast. With each experiment, his speed grew, until he was finally able to break the sound barrier simply by running. He eventually became so fast that his fur turned a deep shade of blue. If I could duplicate his results, then I would no longer need a robot army- just one or two more Sonics in my possession would be more than enough to defend my future Empire. I saw such great potential in him. That is, until last night.

You see… he's escaped.

And I do not tolerate escape.


	2. Chapter 2

You don't know freedom like I know freedom.

To you, freedom probably just means you're allowed to go to the bathroom without somebody yelling at you, or that the entire contents of the fridge are free for you to take. Or maybe you're one of those philosophy types, and you think that freedom is, like, a state of mind or something dumb like that.

Nobody really knows what freedom is, but I like to think I do.

Freedom is when I'm allowed out of your box for a few measly minutes, and then they let me just _run_. Run everywhere. Run anywhere. Run forever, if I want to. They can bring me back easy no matter where I go. And each time it happens, I can go faster. Sure, it's only for, like, three minutes, tops, and then I have to go back to my ugly hole for a couple more weeks until they drag me out and throw magic at me until something sticks, but for those few minutes, I am _free. _

I broke the sound barrier last time. It felt incredible. Like the normal rules of gravity just gave up on me, 'cuz I was just going too damn fast for them to keep up. The sound of a sonic boom is the best sound a 'hog could ever hear, and once I heard it, I never wanted to hear anything else again. Nothing could ever sound cooler.

Well. Old Doc was real happy about all that. He'd been waiting for a boom probably ever since he caught me- why'd you think he codenamed me "Sonic"? Once my time was up, however long it was (I never did count the minutes or anything), he pulled me right back to Scrap Brain and started running a whole bunch of tests on me that I didn't care about. Junk about the "blue emerald" being what makes me fast, or crap about how I'm blue now because of the "cobalt effect"? I didn't care. I just started counting the time until I'd be allowed to go out again, which was a pretty long time.

And then, that night, I got to thinking: why wait? I'm fast enough to break the sound barrier. I could probably run faster than any SWATbot and break through any security machine. And it was nighttime- Eggbelly was probably sleeping. I could just… go…

I could just go…

_I could just go._

So I went.

There were sirens, and loud voices yelling "INTRUDER ALERT", and laser turrets, and whole squads of guard robots trying to take me down. But they were no matches for the boom. Once I got going, I pounded through concrete, iron, steel- a big blue blur of baddie blasting.

I kept on blasting away, until there wasn't anything left to blast. Nothing but air.

I looked around me for the first time in a long while, and for once I didn't see anything metal. Just a big, wide open world, with flowers, valleys, rocks, mountains, hills - lots and lots of hills. I had almost forgotten how pretty the world was.

Still running, I took a peek behind me. Scrap Brain was in total chaos. Search lights were flaring up, sirens were screeching, and spy robots were practically falling over each other to try to find me. I could just imagine the look on Ro-_butt_-nik's face when he found out that his favorite toy had escaped.

I whispered to myself, "Awesome."

After I escaped, I didn't do much for a while. I just kinda ran. But can you blame me? After being cooped up for who-knows-how-long with this amazing power I could only use once every three weeks, now that I was free I was going to use it every chance I got!

So I basically just ran and ran and ran and ran, until I got tired, and when I did get tired, I sat down and had a chat with some locals. I've never been really good at making friends, but these were all some very nice guys, and I basically became "one of them" in just a few short hours.

There was Flicky, the busy mama bird; Johnny Lightfoot, the quick bunny (who's pretty jealous of how fast I am- but who could blame him?); Sally Acorn, the cute liI' chipmunk ("cute" in more ways than one… heh heh); and a whole bunch of other guys. It was pretty nice having somebody else to talk to, and it was even nicer having so many REAL friends. Like I said, I'd never been very good at making any.

After that, life was good and peaceful for a long while. Yeah, sure, Badniks did come for me. Of course. I knew the Old Doc would want to get me back. But, hey, you can't always get what you want, right? And there's always one thing you can count on with Eggman: he can never build a robot that can keep up with me.

So, whenever they came, I just tore them to shreds. It didn't matter what they were made of or what sort of powers they had, they were just no matches for my Sonic Spin. Just one quick hop or somersault and WHAM! They were just a pile of puny little pieces.

Now, trashing bad guys is fun and all, and I still say it's the best workout you could ever get, but sometimes I get so carried away that I don't think about things. I never asked myself "just where are all these Badniks coming from?" Even a guy as rich and powerful as old Eggbelly was bound to run out of power eventually, right? Well, wrong. He'd been using something way stronger than any other power source, and when I found out what it was, let's just say I wasn't gonna just lie down and let him use it.


End file.
